MESSAGIO GALORE IX (a glimpse)

People grow more comfortable saying what they think of sound poetry as the years go by. And sound poetry evolves.

Starting from first principles, a few: people always have a really good time at sound poetry events. Perhaps something to do with the suppression of regular interaction and speech for a while, it creates an opening. Maybe a better theory is that sound poetry pulls the scoop of culture furthest into the quasi-exclusivities of rareness in both poetry and culture as a whole. Everyone is welcome, and newcomers always smile. Subsect of a subsect of a subsect.

And right next door to visual poetry, down a hall, up some side stairs, down a hallway, into a room.

Some remark about the parts of it that sound like someone straining to crap, or like an intensely frustrated person struggling to speak, or sound like crazy frantic anger.

It’s all part of life.

It seems that as the decades go by sound poetry improves musically and in other subtleties. …This is of course a review that in the short term will be read by more very familiar (and in most cases present) so reviewing’s tough because I already said out loud my own favorite moments. I was not following the intensive detailed program in print during – print good but small and not much light – and even here at home it’d take the stronger glasses a bright light and a really clear mind to try to say which piece was which.

The first set had gained its ground and settled in and reality was starting to effuse behind and before the processions of sounds at one point it felt vividly like a homeworld street evening somewhere in Europe, a woman calling in her kids, first confidently and assuredly, then becoming more angst ridden, the subterrainean panic in the roots of things, but then all well, then a kind of imitation of the dinner table, and the five stages of denial for some upsetting news. The last stage might be distraught anger and futility, followed by the continuity of time.

A great great favorite was what for sure sometimes would have been train sounds, the sudden thundering shudder of passing something large, or another train, and other times the deep forboding rythm rising so gradually from the whole hulking machine. It went on at length and was very good. In the early going they came into it with a flourish and were in an alien huskur du fly with it, later bringing it back to script and approaching each next section.

Such an interesting cast, the Ottawa folk participating and here for it. Count on Curry to find the people not programmed to the mannequin culture of public Ottawa. I could write a novel about Ottawa’s double reality, but they performed great and I can well imagine a Sergeant Pepper’s Edition some day with cast members from the different periods of MESSAGIO GALORE.